“I’m a war correspondent,” I said. “Civilians is a stretchy term.”
“It’s a line they don’t care about,” he said. “All they’d see is leverage.”
I swirled my wine, watching the red cling to the sides of the glass. “You think you’re the only one who gets to decide what risks I take?”
“No,” he said. “I think I’m the only one who knew the details you didn’t.”
That landed like a stone in my stomach.
“What details?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Things I still can’t tell you without dragging you into exactly what I was trying to pull you out of.”
I hated that. Hated classified. Hated operational need-to-know. Hated that the man in front of me was a wall I could only climb so high before the barbed wire started.
“I would’ve gone with you,” I said, the words slipping out before I could throttle them. “Back then. If you’d said the word. If you’d asked.”
His fingers tightened around his glass. “I know.”
“Do you?” I asked. “Because from where I’m sitting, it looks like you decided for both of us.”
He dropped his gaze to the tablecloth, jaw working.
“Every scenario I ran ended with you dead or disappeared,” he said. “There wasn’t a version where you got to keep writing and I got to keep doing what I was doing and we both walked away clean.”
“You don’t get to protect me from my own choices,” I said.
He looked up again, and the shine in his eyes made something in my chest crack.
“You think I don’t know that?” he asked. “You think I haven’t replayed that night a thousand times, tried to find the version where I stay, where I tell you everything, where we leave together and figure it out from there?”
I held his gaze. The candle threw shadows across the fine lines at the corners of his eyes that hadn’t been there before.
“What happens in that version?” I asked, voice low.
He let out a breath, slow. “You hate civilian life,” he said. “We fight every time we see something on the news I can’t talk about. You resent me for turning your work into mine by proximity. We try to build something on a foundation that’s half lies and half rules I can’t break. Eventually, one of us walks, anyway.”
“That’s very dramatic for a man who complains about adjectives on menus,” I said, but it came out softer than I meant.
Our food arrived then, a small mercy. Scallops, golden and seared, nestled on a bed of something creamy and clever. His steak, thick and charred just right. For a few minutes, conversation narrowed to forks and flavor, the familiar ritual of sharing bites, trading opinions.
“Okay, that is offensive,” I said around a mouthful of whatever magic Verandelle had done to my plate.
He pointed his fork at me. “See? Adjectives have their place.”
We ate, and the sharp edges dulled just enough to let other words in.
“What about your version?” he asked eventually, cutting into his steak. “The one where I don’t disappear. What does it look like?”
I thought about it.
In my version, the war ended. The story didn’t, but the place did. We got on a plane together, not as soldier and embedded journalist, but as something messy and undefined. We landed somewhere with fewer checkpoints. Maybe Canada. Maybe Montana. Some place with more trees than concrete.
“You come home with me,” I said slowly. “Not to my parents—they’d have fallen over dead at the sight of you—but to a small apartment that smells like takeout and deadlines. You learn to sleep through sirens instead of artillery. I write about politics instead of bombs. You pretend civilian clothes don’t itch.”
He smiled, faint. “You think I’d do well at dinner parties?”
“You’d terrify the donors and charm the interns,” I said. “It would be a service to democracy.”
